Is Cooking Ever an Art?

A book has landed with a considerable thud on my desk — a two-volume, 18.2-pound, 932-page production, entitled Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession, by photographer Jeff Scott and chef Blake Beshore. It is a collection of photos, with very little text, showing the work of cooks on the line and focusing on 10 well-known American chefs — mostly Sean Brock, along with George Mendes, Johnny Iuzzini, Emma Hearst, Zak Pelaccio, Michael Laiskonis, Jason Neroni, Matt Gaudet, Joel Harrington, and Neal Fraser.

There are shots of order tickets, menu notes, 23 photos of one chef working out with a punching bag, and nine pages of the inside of a flour mill. But mostly there are hundreds of photos of cooks' hands putting the final touches on dishes — a periwinkle on tapioca, a dot of sauce on octopus, a blow torch used on cactus pads. There are no recipes.

It is an odd production, to be sure (and for some reason not available for sale on Amazon), but you can hardly fault the exuberance of Scott and Beshore in trying to view "chefs as artists who alter our emotional state by psychologically affecting our sense memories," citing Sean Brock on the reaction of an unidentified food writer who broke down while eating his food: "This food writer ate a dish and cried. She came back to the kitchen in tears. It's crazy when food affects people like that. They get into it so much that it's too much for them, it's emotional for them. When grown people start crying that's insane." [Italics his.] True.

The book is an extravagance of both scale and scope, especially since a two-volume Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci weighs in at just 294 pages and 1.6 pounds. More important, its publication poses the question: Is cooking really an art?

The new fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives a reasonably cogent definition of art: "The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words." It also gives a fourth definition of an art as "a skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation: the art of negotiation." The fifth definition is "artful contrivance; cunning."

When it comes to cooking, I'd be happy to apply these last two, but not the first, and I might also argue that art, as noted in the first definition, surely doesn't have to be "beautiful," at least in the superficial sense. There is ugly art (Hieronymus Bosch) and troubling art (Goya's Disasters of War) and art that is deliberately in your face (Kerouac's On the Road), disorienting (Kubrick's 2001), even repulsive (the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen"). Cooking, on the other hand, should be none of these things except, perhaps, beautiful to look at on the plate and delicious on the tongue. Creative cooking might well enlighten a person to new possibilities or ways of thinking about a pea shoot, and that is a good thing in a world of fast, frozen, chemically-enhanced foods.

Cooking can be provocative, but it is the rare chef who makes food that is deliberately distasteful or that seeks to outrage people, as great art often does. Another huge production on food — a six-volume, 2,438-page, 48-pound book called Modernist Cuisine — actually proves that cooking is more chem lab than art studio — at enormous cost. As any pastry chef will tell you, there is no less science involved in the making of a croissant than in the glazing of fine china.

Cooking, like the art of negotiation, the art of politics, even the art of war, is clearly a skill attained by study, practice, and observation — that is, an admirable craft. That is what the great 19th-century master chef Carême, who codified French haute cuisine, meant when he titled his five-volume encyclopedia L'Art de la Cuisine Française, and what Escoffier, a century later, called the "glory of the art of cookery."

Thus, imagination and creativity go into cooking, often at a very high level, at which point it is called haute cuisine. But there is nothing that rises to the level of true art in a craft whose very existence depends on the constant replication of a dish, night after night, week after week. The replication of a series of stencils, even if originally designed by Raphael, does not constitute art, and I'm sure Andy Warhol was mumbling all the way to the bank when his work went from reproducing Brillo boxes to having assistants mimic his own work.

"If chefs ate their own food," said Paul Bocuse, "we'd have a better cuisine," and the first duty of any cook is to make delicious food, to make his or her guests happy, sometimes surprising them with a novel idea, sometimes keeping them guessing with a bit of trompe l'oeil. The French have always recognized this distinction, emphasizing again and again simplicity in cooking, just as did da Vinci when he said of art and craft, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." When a chef goes to deliberate extremes to dazzle on the plate, he or she is violating the cardinal principle French gastronome Curnonsky insisted on: "Cuisine is when things taste like themselves." In cooking, form follows function, not vice versa, in the same way that the designer of a beautiful airplane has, by necessity, to make sure the wings stay on.

Line cooks are obsessive as they can be when 25 orders come in at once. They try very hard to make the food as good as they have been taught, but too many chefs get hung up on their own images, causing fawning media to toss around terms like "artist" and "genius" as if they were Cézanne painting apples and pears. Ever humble Cézanne (whose favorite food was potatoes cooked in oil) insisted, "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."

Surely, using tweezers to place micro-greens just so on top of layers of foie gras and puff pastry does not constitute art at any level. There is a craft to making good pizza or a perfect roast chicken, but it is not an art form. Extravagance in cuisine, whether it's the mounting of a 200-course dinner at Versailles or a duck stuffed into a turkey, is mere cunning artifice, to be applauded for what it is: fun, enticing, beautiful, though not exactly da Vinci.

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